Capabilities

Breakthrough, in-memory performance

With SQL Server 2014, new in-memory capabilities for transaction processing and enhancements for data warehousing complement our existing technologies for data warehousing and analytics. Scale and transform your business with up to 30x performance gain for transaction processing using existing hardware, and a greater-than 100x performance gain for data warehousing.

Proven, predictable performance

SQL Server consistently leads in TPC-E, TPC-H and real-world application performance benchmarks. SQL Server is SAP-certified to run some of the most demanding workloads. Get more predictable performance of virtualized SQL Server instances with IO governance in Resource Governor.

High availability and disaster recovery

Gain mission critical uptime, fast failover, improved manageability, and better use of hardware resources through enhanced AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2014, a unified solution for high availability. In SQL Server 2014, setting up AlwaysOn becomes even easier with new Add Replica wizard and if you are looking to implement hybrid HA using Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines you can take advantage of new AlwaysOn templates to automate HA setup.

Enterprise scalability across compute, networking, and storage

With SQL Server and Windows Server, physical processing now scales up to 640 logical processors, and virtual machines scale up to 64 logical processors. SQL Server also utilizes storage spaces and network virtualization to optimize your resources. It can also run on Windows Server Core to lower the surface area of attack.

Security and compliance

Help secure data for mission critical workloads with transparent data encryption, robust auditing, extensible key management and encrypted backups. It is even easier to manage permissions for data access to support separation of duties across various users.

Consistent data platform on-premises to cloud

Leverage existing skills and familiar tools like Active Directory and SQL Server Management Studio across on-premises SQL Server and Microsoft Azure. Have the flexibility to run your SQL Server workloads in Azure Virtual Machines(VM), giving you complete control of the VM. Or use Azure SQL Database service to further simplify the need to manage your SQL Server instances while providing unique scale-out architecture.

Access data in familiar tools like Excel

Faster insights for all users with Power BI

Accelerate time-to-insight, on-premises and in the cloud with SQL Server 2014 and Power BI for Office 365. Get richer visualizations using Power Map and Power View. Search, access, and shape internal, external, structured, and unstructured data with Power Query. Access insights from anywhere using Power BI for Office 365.

Scalable data warehousing

Scale to petabytes of data for enterprise-grade relational data warehousing using scale out Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture using the Analytics Platform System (APS) and have the ability to integrate with non-relational sources like Hadoop. Support your needs from smaller datamarts to your largest enterprise data warehouses while improving queries by more than 100x faster than your legacy data platform and reduce storage with new enhanced data compression.

Data quality and integration services

Integration services includes rich support for extract, transact and load (ETL) tasks, and the ability to run and manage as a separate SQL Server instance. Improve data quality by using organizational knowledge and third-party data providers to cleanse data through Data Quality Services.

Robust development tools

Updated developer tools are integrated into Visual Studio and are available for download to build next-generation web, enterprise, business intelligence and mobile applications across on-premises and cloud. Customers can use industry standard APIs (ADO.NET, ODBC, JDBC, PDO, and ADO) across varied platforms including .NET, C/C++, Java, Linux, and PHP.